Trump's deportation limits
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Immigration court numbers — along with the mechanics of deportation — suggest that President-elect Trump's push for mass deportations of criminals could take some time, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.
Here's a slice of the math behind the incoming Trump administration's "worst first" plan for prioritizing deportations based on public-safety and national-security threats:
- Fewer than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the past fiscal year — involving about 8,400 people — included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found.
- Add to that more than 400,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions in the past few decades, many of whom are being held in federal, state or local facilities. About 29,000 of those felons have been convicted of homicide or sexual assault.
💡 Reality check: Study after study has indicated that immigrants — those in the U.S. legally or undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.
🧮 By the numbers: There are roughly 24.5 million noncitizen immigrants in the U.S., including those awaiting asylum decisions or otherwise here lawfully, according to the Pew Research Center.
- Immigration courts recorded 1.8 million new cases from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, reviewed by Axios.
- Just 0.47% of those cases involved possible deportations based on alleged criminal activity.
What they're saying: Trump will marshal all resources for "the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers in American history," Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, said in a statement.
- The Trump transition team declined to address the low number of current immigration cases involving immigrants who've committed crimes.
Trump's incoming border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo: "We know a record number of people on the terrorist watch list have crossed this border. We know a record number of terrorists have been released in this country."
